THE CAMPAIGN: McGovern’s First Crisis: The Eagleton Affair

I assume that everyone here is impressed with my control of this convention in that my choice for Vice President was challenged by only 39 other nominees. But I think we learned from watching the Republicans four years ago as they selected their vice-presidential nominee that it pays to take a little more time.

WITH those wry words, George McGovern began his acceptance speech in Miami Beach three weeks ago. The hour was horrendously late because of all those unruly, facetious vice-presidential nominations from the convention floor, but McGovern was saying to the delegates that he did not mind because Senator Thomas Francis Eagleton of Missouri was so clearly a superior alternative to Spiro Agnew. Only moments before, Eagleton had stood on the podium with his running mate, arms raised in triumph, a partly dazed but wholly rapturous grin spread across his boyish, Jack Lemmony face.

In fact, of course, George McGovern and the Democrats had not taken more time; they had probably taken less time than any major party in history to choose their vice-presidential candidate. The great Democratic reforms had somehow not got round to improving the haphazard system of choosing a Vice President (see TIME ESSAY).

Tom Eagleton, 42, was the product of a half day’s furious scrambling, a choice agreed on only an hour before the deadline, after five or six other men had turned down the No. 2 spot. Last week, when it was revealed that he had been thrice hospitalized for mental illness, the disclosure threatened to wreck the McGovern candidacy before the presidential candidate ever hit the campaign trail against Richard Nixon.

The debacle cast doubts in every direction. McGovern, who has premised his campaign on candor and openness, angled and maneuvered, his judgment open to question. His brilliant young staff, which had brought off a modern political miracle in delivering him the nomination, proved to have stumbled badly in processing Eagleton’s selection. Eagleton emerged as either naive or overambitious and dishonest in not telling McGovern about his past illness. Yet there was considerable sympathy for him as he rode out the incredible week with reasonably good humor and grace. It was, after all, not easy to be brought from relative obscurity to the relative glory of a vice-presidential candidacy, only to face the prospect of being flung down again.

The drama began early in the week when Eagleton was forced to reveal that on three occasions, in 1960, 1964 and 1966, he had been hospitalized in St. Louis or at the Mayo Clinic for nervous exhaustion. When the McGovern camp learned that the Knight newspapers were ready to break a story on Eagleton’s medical history (see THE PRESS), McGovern and his running mate decided to break the news themselves at a press conference in Sylvan Lake, S. Dak. Eagleton described himself as “an intense and hard-fighting person,” and added: “I sometimes push myself too far.” After his successful 1960 campaign for attorney general of Missouri, he was hospitalized in St. Louis “on my own volition” for about four weeks for “exhaustion and fatigue.” He spent four days at the Mayo Clinic in 1964, and about three weeks in 1966. On two of those occasions, in 1960 and 1966, he underwent electric-shock therapy for depression. Now, he said, “I have every confidence that I’ve learned how to pace myself and know the limits of my own endurance.”

McGovern, seated at Eagleton’s side, was quick to defend his man. “I think Tom Eagleton is fully qualified in mind, body and spirit to be the Vice President of the United States and, if necessary, to take on the presidency at a moment’s notice,” McGovern said. McGovern noted that when he had asked Eagleton to be his running mate, he had inquired “if he had any problems in his past that were significant or worth discussing with me.” Eagleton told him no—”and I agree with that,” McGovern said. He added: “If I had known every detail that he discussed this morning, he would still have been my choice for Vice President.”

Dismay. If McGovern thought that those firm words would be the end of it, he was badly mistaken. Almost at once, the Furies descended. The telephones and news tickers at McGovern’s temporary headquarters in Custer, S. Dak., quickly relayed the anger and dismay of key Democrats round the U.S. McGovern’s finance chiefs, already facing a red-ink campaign, winced in despair. Editorialists let go their thunderbolts, crying for Eagleton to quit the ticket. McGovern calmly stayed put in South Dakota. Eagleton, at first shaken, gained strength through a hectic week of campaigning in California and Hawaii. By the end of the week, it was McGovern who seemed to be wavering as he apparently tried to ditch Eagleton without actually informing his running mate directly. They would meet early this week in Washington. But McGovern made no effort to discourage his backers from dump-Eagleton talk, and he tried to enlist the press in getting the word to Eagleton. In stories based on conversations with him but transparently attributed only to “sources close to McGovern,” he passed the word that Eagleton should take himself out of contention. Eagleton had damaged the ticket, and he should jump without waiting to be pushed.

McGovern’s shift away from Eagleton seemed to be based in part on the verdicts of major U.S. newspapers, most of which—including the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times—called for Eagleton to quit. After a two-day pause for reflection, the New York Times concurred.

McGovern was also swayed by strong supporters among Democratic leaders, like Frances (“Sissy”) Farenthold of Texas and Matthew Troy Jr. of New York, who said loudly that they could not vote for the ticket if Eagleton stayed on it. Few took the issue as lightly as Julian Bond of Georgia: “At least we know ours had treatment. What about theirs?” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was compassionate. “All of us are sick sometimes,” he said. “Many people become seriously ill, but they come back and carry on their activities very successfully and capably.” The underlying, widespread worry was whether Eagleton would be equal to the strain if he should succeed to the presidency. Portland Lawyer Robert Duncan, a Democrat active in Oregon politics, spoke for many: “I think what will worry people is this stress problem. They will all see him standing eyeball to eyeball with Russia—and then going out and getting shock treatment.”

There was some feeling that such criticism was unfair, that mental illness should be regarded like any other illness and not held against a man once he is cured. The matter raised profound questions about what America expects of its public men—and of itself—and how it defines strength or weakness.

A secret poll of Democratic county leaders in Wisconsin, a strong McGovern state that is in many ways an American microcosm, found 38% of those interviewed believed Eagleton to be so serious a drag on the ticket that he should go. Yet McGovern may have somewhat misjudged the voters’ response to the Eagleton revelations. In a poll carried out for TIME last week by Crossley Surveys Inc., 76.7% of those interviewed said that Eagleton’s medical record would not affect their vote (see box). A significant number said they were ready to switch from supporting McGovern or being neutral to backing Nixon. Before McGovern had seen any polls on public reaction to the Eagleton matter, he told TIME’S Dean Fischer: “If we took a poll and 99% of the people polled thought he should stay on the ticket, that other 1% could still be crucial.”

The Republicans were naturally delighted, although fellow Senators expressed sympathy for Eagleton and President Nixon instructed Republicans to say nothing political in public about the matter. Republicans hardly needed to; the Democrats and the editorial writers were doing it for them.

The search for alternatives began. Senator Edward Kennedy, encountered after a Washington speech last week, was told: “You’re going to be under pressure again, if you aren’t already, to do something to rescue the party.” Kennedy made a face: no way. By some reports, McGovern was mulling a new list of four men—each, like Eagleton, a Roman Catholic—one of whom might be tapped for the vice presidency instead:

PATRICK LUCEY, 54, Governor of Wisconsin, a Kennedy loyalist who helped J.F.K. carry the state’s important primary in 1960. His wife Jean may be a liability; she is outspoken, though not in Martha Mitchell’s league, and sometimes squabbles with her husband in public; police were once called to the Governor’s mansion when, after an evening of one too many, he locked her out of the bedroom.

LARRY O’BRIEN, 55, outgoing Democratic national chairman and now national campaign chairman in the McGovern campaign, master political tactician, architect of the Kennedy 1960 victory. O’Brien has never held elective office, but he made a good impression on the voters by his skillful handling of the Miami Beach convention, and he would serve as a bridge to the old-line party establishment.

KEVIN WHITE, 42, mayor of Boston, on McGovern’s original list of vice-presidential prospects but dropped because Massachusetts delegates threatened to boycott the convention if McGovern picked him. They objected because White was a pro-Muskie, old-school politician. He would give the ticket an Eastern, urban balance.

SARGENT SHRIVER, 56, first head of the Peace Corps, later chief of the Office of Economic Opportunity and U.S. ambassador in Paris, brother-in-law of Ted Kennedy. He has never run in an election, though he once considered trying for Governor of Maryland.

If McGovern does drop Eagleton, the process of confirming a successor could get messy. One group of Democratic National Committee members, allocated to the various states on the same basis as convention delegates, would ratify McGovern’s choice of a replacement for Eagleton. The trouble is that the D.N.C., like the convention, is operating under new rules; about 25 of the 161 members who would vote on a new No. 2 nominee have not even been selected, and, as at the convention, some of the delegations could be challenged. Probably in practice the problems would not be great, since the Democrats well know that the last thing they need in 1972 is one more intraparty fight. McGovern’s choice would doubtless be quickly endorsed.

Guts. Amid all the talk of replacing Eagleton, he kept insisting that he would bow out if McGovern wanted him to but that McGovern was still behind him. At one time Eagleton promised to telephone his doctors and ask them if they could make a statement about his health (he never did). While he was in Honolulu, there came another blow—which, in the unlikely event Eagleton survives, could well turn out to be what saved his candidacy. Washington Columnist Jack Anderson asserted on his daily Mutual broadcast that he had “located photostats of half a dozen arrests” of Eagleton “for drunk and reckless driving.” “A damnable lie,” Eagleton retorted furiously, and Anderson did indeed turn out to be wrong. After the Anderson disclosures boomeranged, Eagleton grew visibly more self-confident: he was going to fight on whether McGovern wanted him or not. Once, asked if he would take his case to the nation on television, he replied: “I won’t put my family on television.” He added: “We have a dog, too, called Pumpkin.” At a convention of the Retail Clerks International Association in Honolulu, where the McGovern-Eagleton ticket got a labor endorsement that was all the more welcome because of the crisis, Eagleton invoked Harry Truman, a predecessor as a U.S. Senator from Missouri and as a Democratic candidate for Vice President. “I hope I have some small measure of the guts he possessed,” said Eagleton. The shouting delegates replied: “Give ’em hell, Tom!” It was an eloquent self-defense and a larruping attack on the Republican enemy. Eagleton: “The people have understanding and compassion in their hearts. I’m a stronger, better person than I was 72 hours ago. You have to come under a little adversity to find out who your friends are.”

He had few remaining friends on McGovern’s staff. McGovern confessed to one political ally that there were deep and bitter divisions among his advisers over the Eagleton matter. Nobody was enthusiastic about keeping Eagleton; the best that his defenders counseled was a wait-and-see approach. Press Secretary Dick Dougherty and South Dakota Lieutenant Governor Bill Dougherty both favored dumping Eagleton. Fred Dutton, author of Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970’s and McGovern’s most thoughtful political adviser, was adamantly anti-Eagleton. An almost Mafia-like atmosphere developed amid the rustic charms of McGovern’s retreat, in strange contrast to the serene images of the candidate canoeing and playing with Atticus, his Labrador retriever.

All this—the editorials, the party pros, his own senior staff—led McGovern to buckle late last week. On Friday afternoon he telephoned Jules Witcover of the Los Angeles Times at the Hi-Ho Motel in Custer. McGovern invited Witcover to his cabin for an hour-and-a-half interview. Witcover’s lengthy piece conveyed McGovern’s message: public reaction to the disclosure of Eagleton’s past health problems has been so negative that Eagleton must withdraw —voluntarily. McGovern told Witcover that he was confident of Eagleton’s capacity to be President, but that Eagleton’s failure to disclose the medical background reflects on McGovern’s own credibility. Credibility has been McGovern’s rallying cry in the campaign. Also, he had said during the campaign that he would listen to the people—and the people, he told Witcover, seemed to be against Eagleton.

Just to make certain that his message got through, McGovern table-hopped during dinner with his family that night at the Sylvan Lake Lodge, moving from one table of reporters to the next. He never said flatly that he wanted Eagleton to quit, but the hints were plain to all present. Next day McGovern even suggested that he had been doubtful all along. After telephoning Eagleton in San Francisco, he announced: “I have insisted and still insist on a proper period of evaluation by both of us on this difficult question.” Later, still leaving Eagleton a dangling man, McGovern said: “I’m with Senator Eagleton all the way—until he and I have a chance to talk.”

It seemed a curious way to do business. Why not directly tell Eagleton to quit, rather than send him messages through the headlines? Was McGovern trying to avoid the onus of firing his man? Or was it perhaps that Eagleton was having none of it? Eagleton seemed to suggest as much in his account of a Saturday telephone conversation with McGovern. McGovern, he said, had told him that he “had been under pressure” about Eagleton’s candidacy. Yet, Eagleton insisted, three times in the course of the conversation he had wrung from McGovern the phrase “that he’s 1,000% for me.” Defiantly, the vice-presidential candidate told newsmen: “I’m going to stay on the ticket. That’s my firm, irrevocable intent.” Even if McGovern decides to keep Eagleton after all, the net effect has been to make McGovern look either devious or weak or both, or at the most charitable, indecisive.

Just before he returned to Washington and the confrontation with his running mate, McGovern stopped off in Aberdeen to address the South Dakota Democratic convention. Since he picked Eagleton, he said, “we have had some heart-rending days.” He added: “I do not know how it will all come out, but I do know that it gets darkest just before the stars come out. I ask for your prayers and your patience for Senator Eagleton and me while we deliberate on the proper course ahead.”

Most Americans who deliberated on the proper course for McGovern and Eagleton raised some serious questions about both men and their way of doing things.

>Why did Eagleton not tell McGovern his medical history right away? Either he deliberately concealed it, or, as he suggests, he did not consider it serious enough to bring to McGovern’s attention. Either way, his judgment and thus his fitness for high office is in question. Before McGovern telephoned him in Miami Beach, Eagleton’s wife Barbara warned him that if vice-presidential lightning struck, the health issue would be raised. Eagleton says that rumors about drinking and nervous exhaustion were around on the convention floor the night before he was picked; he says flatly that McGovern’s staff knew about the rumors and never asked him about them. Says one McGovern aide: “He did not fully appreciate the intensity of public attention in a national campaign.” Tom Eagleton is an unlikely Macbeth, but it seems that vaulting ambition confused his judgment and now threatens to destroy him politically.

Missouri Governor Warren Hearnes, no close friend of Eagleton’s, had an explanation: “It is hard for people not in politics to understand Eagleton’s position. Eagleton’s lifelong ambition to be Vice President overshadowed any rational consideration.”

> What effect does Eagleton’s medical history have on his fitness for the vice presidency—which means, potentially, for the enormous burdens of the presidency? Past U.S. Presidents have had their emotional problems: John Adams had several nervous breakdowns, Franklin Pierce was an alcoholic, Abraham Lincoln had recurring periods of near-suicidal depression, Rutherford Hayes as a young man wandered about the streets of Sandusky, Ohio, weeping uncontrollably. Lesser officials have also been afflicted. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal committed suicide in 1949 while hospitalized for involutional melancholia. Alabama Governor George Wallace, who announced last week that he would not seek a third-party nomination this year, still receives a 10% disability check from the Veterans Administration because of “psychoneurosis” incurred during World War II. As for Eagleton’s illness, medical experts know neither what causes depression nor why electric-shock therapy is effective against it, but most of them insist that it is a relatively common ailment and by no means a permanent disability (see story, page 16).

There may be in Eagleton’s background a clue to those psychiatric difficulties. Says a Republican acquaintance: “He was always being pushed by his father. This may have contributed to his difficulties.” His lawyer-father was once an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of St. Louis, and when Tom came home after Amherst and Harvard Law, he soon plunged into the politics he had been weaned on. He was always the youngest—youngest city circuit attorney at 27, youngest state attorney general at 31, youngest Lieutenant Governor at 35. When he first arrived in Jefferson City, the rural, stodgy state capital, his breezy manner made a few influential enemies. They are thought to have started the drinking rumors that have plagued Eagleton’s career and are, by every reliable account, without foundation. He was a one-of-the-boys drinker as a weekday bachelor in Jeff City, but no one there recalls that alcohol was ever a problem.

At the same time, because of his easygoing style, his youth and his ability, Tom Eagleton made a lot of friends in Jeff City and around Missouri. He is known as a smooth, effective campaigner, charming his constituents with his informality and wry, self-effacing wit. Pulling into small towns, he has been known to pop out of his Cadillac and announce: “Here I am, folks, in living color.” In rural areas he can be as folksy as the soybean farmers in his audience. “I know,” he will drawl, “that you don’t want to hear this on a hot day. But somebody wrote this speech for me and said it was a ‘major policy address.’ So I guess I’ve got to give it.”

Eagleton has been in the Senate since 1968, and with all of his attractive qualities it is no surprise that he caught George McGovern’s attention, though the two men did not become close friends. By all accounts, his behavior in the Senate and around Washington was exemplary. Understandably —if in sharp contrast to last week’s ringing statements that mental illness is no disgrace—Eagleton and his family were extremely careful all along to disguise the facts. When Eagleton was first hospitalized for shock treatments in 1960, his father gave out the story that Tom was suffering from gastric disorders and a virus. Eagleton’s office gave the same reason for the 1964 visit to the Mayo Clinic. In 1966, when he returned to Mayo for shock treatments, his law office issued a statement that he was at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for gastric tests. Eagleton admitted last week that the story was “a ploy, because when you need rest you need rest from the press.” Eagleton’s brother Mark, a physician, told newsmen after the rumors about Tom had started that Tom had really never left St. Louis. Last week Mark finally confessed: “The truth is important, but for us now the most important thing is what is going to hurt or help my brother.”

All this is a partial answer to yet another puzzling question about the affair: Why did McGovern and his staff fail to check Eagleton’s background more carefully? Both the candidate and his aides were busy with other things in the important period between McGovern’s California primary victory and nomination night five weeks later: winning the California credentials challenge, defeating amendments to the party platform that could have proved politically embarrassing, polishing his acceptance summons to “Come Home, America.” Campaign Manager Gary Hart admits: “There were no formal staff meetings, no requests to check people out. I take the blame for not setting up a committee on selection. I should have thought of that.” McGovern’s key staff and advisers met for four hours, recalls Gary Hart, to “consider every legitimate name and pare down to a list of no more than six.” At first there were about 30 names. Most were politicians, but the list also included John Gardner of Common Cause, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame and Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, even Walter Cronkite.

Eagleton’s name, says McGovern Executive Assistant Gordon Weil, had first come up speculatively about a month before. When his assets and liabilities were discussed at the last-minute staff meeting, several staff men mentioned rumors of a drinking problem; none, insists Frank Mankiewicz, concerned hospitalization. Weil and one or two other staffers made quick calls to Missouri political figures and to journalists. Says Hart: “There was no tangible evidence whatsoever. Nobody could verify.” Despite firm, repeated words of discouragement from Edward Kennedy, however, McGovern stuck to the belief that Ted would run as No. 2. Myer Feldman, a McGovern adviser and Kennedy intimate, flew to Hyannisport to take a last-minute sounding. He returned to Miami Beach to tell McGovern: “Ted’s not going to do it.” McGovern was unconvinced. He told Feldman: “When I get the nomination, he’ll be willing.” After Ted Kennedy turned him down for the last time, McGovern had scant time left for another selection.

Grousing. Plainly, McGovern was badly served by his staff—a staff of his choosing. He has had other problems with it, partly because he has confused the areas of authority. Gordon Weil, 35, is an abrasive Ph.D. Who joined two years ago as press secretary. He undertook to investigate the Eagleton rumors and he was the staff man principally responsible for the poorly worked-out welfare scheme that McGovern was forced to abandon during the primary campaign. After McGovern persuaded Larry O’Brien to sign on as national campaign director, Rival Gary Hart started putting out reports that O’Brien’s role was really rather inconsequential. McGovern was outraged —as was O’Brien. After a recent press conference, O’Brien snidely told Hart: “Your candidate looks tired, Mr. Campaign Manager. You’d better see that he gets some rest.” Even the protean and brilliant Frank Mankiewicz is the subject of intramural grousing; staffers complain that he is a poor administrator and that he sometimes seems to think that he is the candidate.

The financial side of McGovern’s operations is in no better shape. The big Democratic moneybags are hostile; even Los Angeles Millionaire Max Palevsky, who contributed some $350,000 to McGovern’s primary campaigns, is disenchanted. Of the Eagleton affair, Palevsky says bitterly: “This is a perfect example of that staff. If there is a way to f— up something, they will find it.” Henry Kimelman, another major McGovern moneyman (see BUSINESS), is also uneasy. Before the Eagleton matter blew up, he was unhappy at the speed with which the tacticians were spending money. Now he has had to hold up a huge direct-mail solicitation because he fears that no one will contribute until the Eagleton matter is resolved.

One irony in all the embarrassment to McGovern and Eagleton is that many political scientists doubt that vice-presidential candidates affect the outcome of presidential elections. Nixon was probably not a minus for Ike in 1952 despite the Checkers affair; Lyndon Johnson, however, was a decisive plus for Kennedy in the much closer 1960 election. Still, Warren Miller, director of the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, says that it is difficult to prove historically that any vice-presidential candidate really made the difference between winning and losing. Political Scientist J. Austin Ranney of the University of Wisconsin agrees. He says of the Eagleton affair: “I think it will blow over by November.”

That depends, of course, on how it comes out and on what scars it leaves within the McGovern camp and among Democratic supporters. McGovern’s people are understandably dismayed about Eagleton, for an unusual kind of idealism brought many of them to the cause. Beyond that, of course, is what the affair will ultimately be judged to have exposed about the character and temperament of George McGovern, who starts from far behind against Nixon and can scarcely afford to give away any points. It has not been a promising beginning for a winning campaign.